Taliban will never regain power in Afghanistan, pledges Rumsfeld
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Your support makes all the difference.The Taliban would never be allowed to return to power in Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday.
After meeting warlords in the north of the country and President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, the US Defence Secretary pledged continued American support, and said: "Those who have been defeated would like to come back but they will not have that opportunity."Just two hours after he spoke a rocket exploded about 300 yards from the American Embassy in Kabul. No injuries were reported. Matyullah Ramani, a senior police officer, said either the Taliban or their former ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyar were responsible. He claimed they were "trying to disrupt the loya jirga [grand council]", which will meet in Kabul next week to approve a new constitution.
The violent resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan has forced the US to rethink its strategy, as it faces the prospect of another guerrilla war. Large numbers of well-equipped Taliban fighters and, it is claimed, al-Qa'ida members, have been returning across the Pakistani border to carry out attacks on American troops. There have also been attacks against foreign aid workers, including the murder of a French woman working for the United Nations, and 11 Afghans employed by international agencies. The UN ispulling out of sections of the south and east of the country.
Yesterday an Afghan worker from a UN-sponsored programme in a western province was killed in an ambush officials blamed on the Taliban.
Captured Taliban fighters say the organisation is well-funded in its Pakistani bolt-holes, with no shortage of arms or communications equipment. The Islamists have progressed from hit-and-run raids on outlying US and government units to bombings in the southern city of Kandahar. The deputy governor of Zabul province admits that most of his province is now in Taliban hands, as is neighbouring Oruzgan. Around half of Kandahar province is also out of government control. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, is said to want to cut off south-east Afghanistan from the rest of the country.
The new American plan involves intense combat missions in the areas where the Taliban are grouping, and a ring of Provincial Reconstruction Teams to oversee disarmament, provide aid and build infrastructure. These will be modelled on a British one in Mazar-i-Sharif which has won kudos for negotiating the first surrender of weapons by the powerful warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum and his rival Ustad Atta Mohammed.
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